This rich and crowded cemetery was all that was known of Etruscan Spina until further drainage operations in 1953, in the Pega Valley, south of the original site ([Fig. 2.5]), brought to light not only 1195 new tombs, but also further surprises. In October, 1956, an air-photograph in color revealed beneath the modern irrigation canals the grid plan ([Fig. 2.6]), resembling Marzabotto’s, of the port area of the ancient Etruscan city. This time the decumanus is a canal, sixty-six feet wide, and the marshy site is revealed as a sort of Etruscan Venice. Later air-photographs showed evidence of habitation over an area of 741 acres, large enough for a population of half a million. Since the artifacts of this vast city are a little later in style than those of Marzabotto, we assume that Spina flourished a little later. Almost no weapons were found in the graves: Spina apparently felt secure on her landlocked lagoon, but she reckoned without attacks from the landward side. Few vases datable later than the late fifth century are found in the graves: the inference is that Spina fell, about 390 B.C., before the same Gallic invasion that despoiled Marzabotto. The two sites together reinforce each other in giving evidence for the use by Etruscan city-planners of the kind of square or rectangular grid of streets later made famous by Roman colonies and Roman camps; unfortunately the question is still open whether the Etruscans invented the grid used in Italy or whether it was a Greek import.
Archaeology tells us something about Etruscan fortifications, too, not least important being some recent negative evidence: many polygonal walls in Etruria and Latium, formerly believed Etruscan, are now proved to be of Roman date. But excavations conducted since 1947 at Bolsena by the French school in Rome have unearthed walls that are genuinely Etruscan, surrounding an Etruscan site, and with Etruscan letters hacked on the blocks. The marks, concentrated on strategic sections of the wall, were probably apotropaic, intended to work as magic charms against the enemy. One section of the wall was only one block thick. It could not have been self-standing; it must have been intended as the spine of an agger or earthwork. Just such a spine was a part of Rome’s earliest walls, and a similar technique is to be seen in early earthworks at Anzio and Ardea. The discovery of these walls has clinched the identification of Bolsena with Etruscan Volsinii, one of the twelve cities, and the scene of regular meetings of the Etruscan League. On the same site were found some temple foundations, but the district is rich farmland, and it proved impossible to dig over a wide enough area to discover whether Volsinii, like Marzabotto and Spina, had a grid plan.
Grid plans suggest a sophisticated, if rigid, political organization for Etruscan cities. Evidence for the political life of a civilization normally comes from literature and inscriptions, very little from artifacts. Yet the Aules Feluskes stele from Vetulonia, already mentioned, shows a figure carrying a double-headed ax. Later, axes were carried by the consul’s twelve bodyguards whom the Romans called lictors. There seems to be a connection between the number twelve and the twelve cities of the Etruscan confederacy. Vetulonia has yielded another object of great interest to those who would understand Etruscan political organization and Rome’s debt to it. In the Tomb of the Lictor was found, besides a chariot and a metal coffer containing gold objects wrapped in gold leaf, a double-headed iron ax ([Fig. 2.7]) hafted onto a single iron rod surrounded by eight others. This is obviously the prototype of the Roman fasces, and indeed Silius Italicus, a Roman epic poet of the Silver Age, assigns the origin of the fasces to Vetulonia. Such artifacts suggest that the ruler of an Etruscan city, whether king or aristocrat, was surrounded by considerable pomp.
Fig. 2.6 Spina: grid plan, air-photograph. (ENIT, Italy’s Life, p. 91)
Fig. 2.7 Vetulonia: fasces from the Tomb of the Lictor.
(M. Pallottino, Etruscologia, Pl. 22)
Etruscan political organization, according to Latin literary sources, at one stage embraced Rome, and an Etruscan inscription on a shiny black dish of the ware called bucchero, in Rome, goes a little way to confirm this. More impressive confirmation comes from a frescoed Etruscan tomb in Vulci, discovered by A. François in 1857. The fresco has a historical subject, a battle scene, portraying two camps, populated with figures labelled in Etruscan letters. The figures in one camp are labelled Aule and Caele Vipina (in Latin, Vibenna), and Macstrna (in Latin, magister); in the other, a figure labelled Cneve Tarchunies Rumach (in Latin, Cn. Tarquinius Romanus), a member of the dynasty of Roman kings which in the historical tradition is alleged to have come from Etruria. Aule Vipina’s name recurs in a votive inscription, from a context dated in the sixth century B.C., found at Veii on a bucchero sherd. The conclusion is inescapable that A. and C. Vibenna were actual historical figures, Etruscan leaders involved in a political struggle for the domination of Rome. Macstrna is identified in Roman tradition with Servius Tullius, a good king whose rule falls, according to the literary tradition, between the tyrannical reigns of the two Tarquins. The fresco may represent an episode in Servius Tullius’ life unknown to the Roman tradition, before he became king in Rome; he is represented rescuing C. Vibenna from the Romans, and killing Tarquin. Thus archaeology here not only confirms the literary tradition of Rome’s Etruscan kings; it suggests something about the internal policy of sixth-century Etruscan cities, the existence in them, perhaps by a constitutional transformation from an archaic kingship, of a strong military authority, like that of the magister populi or dictator of the later Roman Republic. Etruscan tomb inscriptions, with their many personal names, show that official Etruscan nomenclature included—as did the later Roman—the name of the clan. Clan organization is in origin aristocratic. As later in Rome aristocrats with a clan organization overthrew the original monarchy, so too, we may suppose, the clans operated in Etruria.
